Renewing Minds

Serving Church and Society Through Christian Higher Education, Revised and Updated

David S. Dockery

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780805447880
• eBook ISBN: 9781433674679
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God." (Romans 12: 2)

Renewing Minds serves as a clear introduction to the field of higher Christian education, focusing on the distinctive, important role of Christian-influenced learning—both in the Kingdom of God and in the academic world.

Union University president David S. Dockery writes for administrators, trustees, church leaders, faculty, and staff who are just beginning their service or association with a Christ-centered institution, and also to students and parents who are considering a Christian college or university.

Chapters include: "Loving God with Our Minds, " "Renewing Minds, Serving Church and Society, " "Shaping a Christian Worldview, " "Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition, " "Integrating Faith and Learning, " "Envisioning a Shared Community of Tradition, Belonging, and Renewing Minds, " "Establishing a Grace-Filled Academic Community, " "Developing a Theology for Christian Higher Education, " and "Thinking Globally about the Future."

New source information and footnotes have been added to this second edition. While the chapters still reflect their original shape as formal addresses given in various settings, this revised and updated edition formats the book in a way that is more consistent with academic rather than popular expectations.

1
Loving God with Our Minds

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“Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

~Matthew 22:37

“In Augustine's view the incentive for so much learning is
not then by any means mere mastery of knowledge for its
own sake; such ambition ‘puffs up’ the mind and makes it
an object of idolatrous worship. What prompts earnest and
excellent scholarship in the Christian is the ‘fear of the Lord.’”

David Lyle Jeffrey, The People of the Book

“We cannot neglect the soulful development
of a Christian mind.”

J. P. Moreland, Love God
with All Your Mind

“Christ wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The world as we know and experience it in many ways began again on September 12, 2001. We now live with a global awareness and new understandings of terrorism, war, and the meaning of security. As we look around the globe, we observe a shift among the nations that will influence this new century. Futurists are suggesting that China and India are the countries to watch for future economic influence, while places like Nigeria, Brazil, and South Korea will be the sources of strength for a “new Christendom” whose numerical predominance will be located in the Southern hemisphere. These changes require those involved in the work of Christian higher education to look at the future differently than we did just a decade ago.

Current Challenges

Moreover, the changes in higher education seem to be ever-shifting in terms of philosophy, methodology, and delivery system possibilities. It is impossible to keep up with these changes, but we must continue to monitor these trends and provide education that is faithful to our heritage as Christ-centered institutions while seeking to be ever more connected to the reformulations of the world in which we now find ourselves. These changes are manifold and can be summarized in terms of technology; education delivery systems; the rise of for-profit institutions along the landscape of higher education; and the interface between traditional education and the rest of society in terms of internships, classroom consulting, service learning, distance learning, and strategic institutional alliances. All of these cause us to rethink traditional classroom boundaries.

Special interest groups can be expected to offer pressure for higher education institutions to conform on issues that will compromise our mission. We must anticipate that issues of sexuality, sexual freedom, and same-gender unions could impact federal funding and possible accreditation matters for some private church-related institutions. The right to hire will likely be the most important legal issue that Christian colleges and universities face in the near future. These and other issues make the challenges of providing Christ-centered higher education in the twenty-first century more challenging than ever before.

With these factors in mind, we must think wisely, carefully, strategically, and creatively as we look toward the future to enable Christian colleges and universities to become more thoroughly mission driven, grounded in our commitment to offer education that is academically rigorous and unapologetically Christian as we seek to become resources for serious Christian thinking and scholarship in all disciplines for the initial decades of the twenty-first century.

We do so while taking into account the shifts and challenges in our society, in culture at large, in denominational landscapes, in our nation, and in our world. Yet we must not be naïve or deceived. Our world is still plagued by the effects of the fall. The New Testament reminds us that sin has not just impacted individuals; it has impacted creation as well. Since the time when humanity was banished from the garden, disarray and disorder have characterized the earth. The book of Romans claims that creation has been subjected to futility through humanity's sin, though there is hope in the work of Christ.

Until the ultimate redemption of the earth is accomplished, we live with the essential disorder of human life that remains all around us. Newspapers tell us each day that new diseases are discovered, and they afflict thousands around the world. New forms of injustice are contrived and carried out upon the unsuspecting each day. New configurations of suffering are documented daily. Yet we have hope not because of our combined abilities, intelligence, or cleverness but because Jesus Christ has come to this world and by His life, death, resurrection, and exaltation we have and should focus on a hopeful future.¹

We cannot forget the pull of the world or the pull to ignore God so evident all around us. As Christ-followers we are not called out of this fallen world, but we are called to engage it and to sanctify the ongoing secular society in which we live. I believe this is the reality of incarnational Christianity. It is the pattern of truth found in Christ Himself. That being the case, there is no sphere of humanity to which Jesus Christ is irrelevant; and certainly that includes the academic world, which is the focus of this book. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ provide the foundations of a Christian worldview that have cosmic consequences for the way we understand our world and engage the culture in which we live.

A Different Approach to Higher Education

In light of these challenges, I want to propose a different approach to thinking about truth and higher education. I believe that the integration of faith and learning is the essence of authentic Christian higher education and should be wholeheartedly implemented across the campus and across the curriculum. This was once the goal of almost every college in America. This is no longer the case.² Before the nineteenth century every college started in this country, with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, was a Christian-based institution committed to revealed truth. All of that changed with the rise of secularization and specialization, creating dualisms of every kind—a separation of head knowledge from heart knowledge, faith from learning, revealed truth from observed truth, and careers from vocation.

What happened was a loss of an integrated worldview in the academy. There was a failure to see that every discipline and every specialization could be and should be approached from the vantage point of faith, the foundational building block for a Christian worldview. The separation of faith from learning and teaching was the first step toward creating a confused and disconnected approach to higher education, even in church-related institutions.³

Historical Overview

A brief overview of Christian higher education will help us see the shifts and changes in purpose and focus across the years. Early Christian education emphasized catechetical purposes as foundational. Medieval universities (those developed between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries) were largely for the purposes of professional education, with some general education for the elite. Of the seventy-nine universities in existence in Europe during this time, Salerno was best known for medicine, Bologna for law, and Paris for theology.

The Renaissance envisioned the revival of Greek and Roman literature while newer subjects were developing during the medieval periods such as arithmetic, geometry, and music. The Reformation and post-Reformation period placed all aspects of education within the context of a Christian worldview. American higher education reached its zenith, building on what had gone before. Early American colleges governed by trustees from related religious groups provided education within the context of faith and grounded in the pursuit of truth (veritas). Some of these schools included:

Institution/Location	Date Founded	Denomination
Harvard (Massachusetts)	1636	Congregational
William and Mary (Virginia)	1693	Anglican
Yale (Connecticut)	1701	Congregational
Princeton (New Jersey)	1746	New Light Presbyterian
Columbia (New York)	1754	Anglican
Brown (Rhode Island)	1764	Baptist
Rutgers (New Jersey)	1765	Dutch Reformed

Pennsylvania and Virginia were essentially the first secular institutions. The German model espousing research and academic freedom began to influence American higher education in the nineteenth century. Johns Hopkins, founded in Maryland in 1867, was the first purely research institution in this country.

During the nineteenth century, state-supported higher education began to flourish, following the University of Virginia model, which had separated theological influence from the curriculum by abolishing the chair of divinity in its initial reorganization. The University of Michigan adopted a credit point system; Harvard introduced an elective curriculum; and majors and specializations followed as we moved into the twentieth century.

The rise of Enlightenment thought was a watershed in the history of Western civilization; it was a time when the Christian consensus was broken by a radical secular spirit. The Enlightenment philosophy stressed the primacy of nature, a high view of reason and a low view of sin, and an antisupernatural bias; and it encouraged revolt against a faith-affirming perspective on education. Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers severed faith from philosophy and morality. Faith was understood only in pietistic terms, having little connection with matters of truth. Though Schleiermacher tried to save the Christian faith, in reality faith was separated from the exploration of truth—even the Jesus of history and the study of the Bible was separated from the “Christ of faith.”

Early twentieth-century American education was impacted by this mind-set in the modernist-fundamentalist controversies. Both groups in various ways tried to save “faith” through various pietistic approaches; on the one hand you could find the separatistic pietism of American fundamentalism, and on the other there was the pragmatic pietism of William James, the common-faith civil religion of John Dewey, and the historical-experiential religion of Harry Emerson Fosdick. The result, however, was the divorce of faith from teaching and scholarship in universities across the country in the arts, the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, and all other spheres, including the scholarly study of religion.

During this time there remained a belief in a transcultural objective truth in all fields, but th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index